Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies Across Communicative Contexts
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■ Jonathan Daniel Rosa Graduate School of Education Stanford University [email protected] Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies across Communicative Contexts1 This article examines the racialized relationship between ideologies of language standardiza- tion and what I term “languagelessness.” Whereas ideologies of language standardization stigmatize particular linguistic practices understood to deviate from prescriptive norms, ideologies of languagelessness call into question linguistic competence–and, by extension, legitimate personhood–altogether. Throughout the article I show how these ideologies interact with one another, and how assessments of particular individuals’ language use often invoke broader ideas about the (in)competence and (il)legitimacy of entire racialized groups. I focus specifically on dimensions of the racialized relationship between ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness in contemporary framings of U.S. Latinas/os and their linguistic practices. I draw on a range of evidence, including ethnographic data collected within a predominantly Latina/o U.S. high school, institutional policies, and scholarly conceptions of language. When analyzed collectively, these sources highlight the racialized ways that ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness become linked in theory, policy, and everyday interactions. In my examination of these data through the lens of racialization, I seek to theorize how ideologies of language standardization and language- lessness contribute to the enactment of forms of societal inclusion and exclusion in relation to different sociopolitical contexts, ethnoracial categories, and linguistic practices. [language ideologies, racialization, U.S. Latinas/os, standardization, education] White-Thunder, a man round forty, speaks less English than Menomini, and that is a strong indictment, for his Menomini is atrocious...He may be said to speak no language tolerably. –Bloomfield (1927:437) Her English is horrible, and from what I hear, her Spanish isn’t that good either. –A teacher commenting on the English and Spanish language abilities of the principal of New Northwest High School, 2008 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 26, Issue 2, pp. 162–183, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. Copyright © 2016 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12116. 162 Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness 163 Introduction his article examines how processes of racialization organize the relationship between ideologies of language standardization and what I term “language- Tlessness.” Whereas ideologies of language standardization are often understood to stigmatize particular linguistic practices perceived as deviating from prescriptive norms, racialized ideologies of languagelessness call into question linguistic compe- tence—and, by extension, legitimate personhood—altogether. This relationship is illustrated by the quotations above; one is taken from Leonard Bloomfield’s well- known article “Literate and Illiterate Speech” (1927), and the other is from a conversation that I had with a teacher while conducting fieldwork in a predominantly Latina/o2 Chicago public high school. Bloomfield initially frames White-Thunder in relation to ideologies of language standardization that characterize a speaker’s proficiency in a given language as “complete”/”incomplete” and “good”/”bad.” For Bloomfield (1927:437), White-Thunder “speaks less English than Menomini” and “his Menomini is atrocious”; in terms of the categories above, White-Thunder’s English is comparatively “incomplete” and his Menomini is comparatively “bad.” Bloomfield (1927:437) shifts from these articulations of ideologies of language standardization to state that White-Thunder “may be said to speak no language tolerably.” This is a racialized ideology of languagelessness; rather than assessing particular language proficiencies using ideologies of language standardization, ideologies of language- lessness involve claims about a given person’s or group’s limited linguistic capacity in general. It is not by chance that ideologies of language standardization and ideologies of languagelessness would appear in close proximity to one another, as in the Bloomfield example. Both of these language ideologies invoke broader ideas about belonging to language communities and the polities to which these imagined collectivities are understood to correspond (Silverstein 2010). Specifically, ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness are hierarchically ranked approx- imations of belonging to and exclusion from these communities and polities.3 I argue that racialized conceptions of language, which define legitimate language in terms of racial groups whose linguistic practices are stereotypically understood to correspond to standardized written text, link ideologies of language standardization to ideologies of languagelessness. As a result, what might appear as perceptions of particular nonstandardized practices can in fact racialize populations by framing them as incapable of producing any legitimate language. It is through the lens of this racialized relationship between ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness that the second quotation above, in which a white high school teacher assesses the language abilities of her Latina principal, must be analyzed. In the context of a longer statement about the principal’s incompetence and intellectual inferiority, the teacher draws on ideologies of language standard- ization to criticize the principal’s purportedly limited English and Spanish language abilities. According to the teacher, the principal’s English is “horrible” and her Spanish “isn’t that good either”; this is similar to Bloomfield’s construal of White- Thunder’s English and Menomini. White-Thunder and the Latina principal are associated with distinct ethnoracial categories, linguistic codes, and historical moments, but their language use and personhood are racialized similarly—that is, perceived as having no legitimate place within the nation-state. This form of racialization is articulated and organized by the relationship between ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness.4 To the extent that these linguistic assessments function in racializing ways without explicitly invoking race, they exemplify the covert nature of many racializing discourses (Dick and Wirtz 2011) and allow people to reproduce racism while promoting colorblindness or maintaining that we inhabit a postracial society (Alim and Reyes 2011; Chun and Lo 2016). Throughout this article, I will show how ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness interact with one another, and how assessments of particular individuals’ language use often invoke broader ideas about the (in)competence and 164 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (il)legitimacy of entire racialized groups. Specifically, I demonstrate dimensions of the relationship between these ideologies in relation to contemporary framings of U.S. Latinas/os and their linguistic practices. I draw from a range of evidence, including ethnographic data collected within a predominantly Latina/o U.S. high school, institutional policies, and some scholarly conceptions of language. In doing so, I draw connections between the stigmatization of Latinas/os across a range of contexts through raciolinguistic ideologies that “conflate certain racialized bodies with linguistic deficiency unrelated to any objective linguistic practices” (Flores and Rosa 2015:150). These various contexts include the framing of bilingualism as a handicap in U.S. public schools, the classification of multilingual communities as “linguistically isolated” in the U.S. Census, and the delegitimation of heritage language practices in higher education settings. When analyzed collectively, these sources highlight the racialized ways that ideologies of standardization and languagelessness become linked in theory, policy, and everyday interactions. While I focus on language ideologies surrounding the English and Spanish linguistic practices of U.S. Latinas/os, it is important to keep in mind that the example of White-Thunder above points to the ways that any racialized group can be faced with linguistic stigmatization involving ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness; this analysis also suggests how a group that is not yet racialized could come to be racialized through these ideological and institutional processes. Thus, the broader goal is to develop a framework that theorizes how the racialized relationship between ideologies of standardization and languagelessness enacts forms of societal exclusion in relation to different sociopolitical contexts, ethnoracial categories, and linguistic practices. Theorizing Standardization, Racialization, and Languagelessness Ideologies of language standardization relate to what Silverstein (1996:284) describes as a “culture of monoglot standardization,” which is linked to long-standing Enlighten- ment ideologies that presume the primordiality of the one language-one nation-one people construct (Bauman and Briggs 2003). This monolingual political imaginary informed the emergence of modern nation-states and its ongoing hegemony is reflected in the widespread belief in the U.S. context and elsewhere that monolingualism is the natural human state of being (Bonfiglio 2010). Veronelli (2015:119), writing about the “coloniality of language,” suggests that the historical and contemporary racialization